DON COOK JENSEN

1943-1973

Don Jensen was killed in November 1973 in a bicycling accident in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he was spending the year with his wife Joan as a visiting lecturer in mathematics. He was thirty at the time of his death.

Don’s twelve years of climbing were rich in alpine and expeditionary accomplishments, especially in Alaska, Canada, and California. He went on four Alaskan expeditions: to McKinley’s Wickersham Wall (Harvard Route, in 1963), the west face of Huntington (1965), and twice to the east ridge of Deborah (1964 and 1967). The best of his climbs was Huntington; but the closest to his heart were the two failures on Deborah. In Canada he climbed three summers in the Ramparts, making a good new route (southeast ridge) on Bastion with Ken Jennings in 1972. The Sierra Nevada was the range of his boyhood, where he learned to camp and climb, and where he - developed a penchant for long solo trips, even in winter. He probably knew the Palisades better than any other living person; over ten years, first on his own, then as a guide, he put up all kinds of new routes there, especially on Temple Crag and the Firebird. During his one season in the Alps he and Matt Hale had an exceptionally fast time on the first half of the Walker Spur before getting stormed off. After his marriage to Joan Vyverburg in 1968, he did much of his climbing with her.

Don attended Harvard for three years, got his B.A. from Fresno State, and his Ph.D., in the field of mathematical logic, from the University of Southern California in 1970. He taught for two years at the University of Waterloo (Ontario) before accepting the lectureship at the University of Aberdeen. He was just starting to make professional contributions when he died.

The style of Don’s climbs, the special stamp he left on them, came from a blend of daring scheme and methodical preparation. He would choose the route or the mountain; then began a kind of brooding, full of diagrams and logistical data, during which all his other worldly concerns atrophied. Once on the mountain, he made the place livable, familiar, his own: to be at his best there, he had to endue the mountain with the quirks and echoes and scenic furniture of home. He could not stand, for instance, to dash into a range for a weekend. No one I ever knew responded so dramatically to landscape. He would grow physically ill in a hostile environment, like Cambridge; but when he was in one of his right places, like the North Fork of the Palisades in winter, he was as healthy and strong as a baby.

For three years he was my best friend. I have as many memories of Don from those years as I have old Kodak slides in my closet, but a few, especially, haunt me. I see Don sewing a down vest in our musty clubroom, or chopping a hole in a frozen lake in Colorado, one late December dusk; leading at midnight, near exhaustion, up the steep summit icefield on Huntington; crawling out of a crevasse on our Deborah expedition, his lower lip gouged through by the ice. He survived getting avalanched out of Damnation Gully on Mount Washington, when he broke a shoulder-blade; the collapse of Odells Gully when he sank into water up to his waist and nearly got washed over the lip; four serious crevasse falls on Deborah; a concussion on Huntington; bronchitis the second time on Deborah—only to die absurdly, bicycling on his way to work. The last time I saw him he was talking math with a colleague in his own specialty, a rare chance acquaintance with whom, for hours, he could trade arcane gossip about completeness proofs and solvability theory. I saw him then completely absorbed, as effortlessly happy as he was climbing.

To a future generation of climbers, Don’s name may mean little more than the Jensen Pack he invented. I wish they could know him for two other things as well: the ascetic intensity of his life, for which Joan was the ideal partner, and the boldness of his climbing schemes. Shortly before his death, Joan and he were contemplating homesteading in the Yukon, far to the north of Watson Lake. And a friend who had climbed with him last summer said that Don was thinking of trying Deborah again in 1974.

Friends are asked to contribute to the Don C. Jensen Memorial Fellowship, c/o the Mountaineering Fellowship Fund, American Alpine Club, 113 East 90th St., New York, N.Y. 10028. The Jensen Fellowship will support young climbers on small difficult expeditionary efforts like Deborah.

David S. Roberts